Friday, 8 April 2016

Tête à Tête: 20 years of changing opera

Next year, amazingly, Tête à Tête will be 20 and will be celebrating 10 years of their opera festival. Before then, of course we have this year's festival to look forward to along with a number of other events. Tête à Tête has never just been about performing opera, they are equally concerned with facilitating the creation of it, and with the whole business of opera. This weekend, 9 & 10 April 2015 they are co-hosting Devoted and Disgruntled: How can we change opera for the better? Taking place at ENO's Lilian Baylis House, 165 Broadhurst Gardens, London NW6 3AX the event promises to be two days of discussions sessions as a large cross-section of our operatic community; movers, makers, shakers, consumers, activists, re-actionaries, revolutionaries, workers on the factory floor, creators on the edge, at the core, critics, newcomers, old hands, audiences and supporters across the board come together.

That the event is supported by ENO means that the discussions with come at a highly apposite time. The event is facilitated by Improbable, and uses Open Space Technology to allow the group itself to determine the topics and flow of the discussion, and to take action on the urgent issues. If you are interested in or worried about the state of opera today then you should think about going. There is an invitation from Cressida Pollock, chief executive of ENO, on the event website.

Further ahead, Tête à Tête are again collaborating with the Royal College of Music for Crime and Punishment, a
portmanteau of six new pieces inspired by Dostoyevsky, and the event will be live streamed on RCM and Tête à Tête’s website. The event continues on from the Hogarth themed on, Hogarth's Stages which was presented in 2014 (see our review). Lionel Friends conducts, Bill Bankes-Jones directs with operas by Benjamien Lycke (music) & Mien Bogaert (words), Kenichi Ikuno Sekiguchi, Alex Paxton, Algirdas Kraunaitis (music) & Grace Lee-Khoo (words), Amy Bryce (music) & Roland Bryce (words), Sam Hall (music) & Darren Rapier (words). Full information from their website.